


The Soldier, the Hatter, and the White Rook

by AngeNoir



Category: Alice is Dead (Video Game), Avengers Academy (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Alice in Wonderland Fusion, Alternate Universe - Dark, Dystopia, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 18:39:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11019249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/pseuds/AngeNoir
Summary: Steve runs after the Red Skull, outdistancing the Howling Commandos, and runs into some kind of purplish... fog.Steve opens his eyes and suddenly Howard and Peggy are old, people are chasing him, and he's being taken to a Hatter.He might not know what's going on, but he's trying to find out.





	The Soldier, the Hatter, and the White Rook

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://kakushimiko.tumblr.com/post/161136251557/and-here-is-the-first-part-to-the-rbb-cap-im-2017?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma#disqus_thread) wonderful art piece by my artist, Kakushi Miko!
> 
> So! This is an open-ended story (I may or may not revisit, but I like the idea of leaving it there). It's in a way meant to mimic the Alice is Dead video game (of which I completed solely and only because of cheats). It's set in that kind of universe, and initially I had a bunch of characters I wanted to throw in as Wonderland references, and then realized it made more sense and was more concise as is.

_“Captain!”_

_Steve ignored the shouts behind him, legs pumping as he gave chase._

_“ Captain!”_

_“ Steve!”_

_Steve ignored the burning in his lungs, his legs, his eyes. He couldn’t. This man – this person was the one responsible for Bucky’s death, the horror of this war, the fact that all of them were too young and too broken. This thing was all he knew of, and he ignored how he was outdistancing the Commandos, outpacing his backup. How he was leaving Peggy and little Howard behind, how there was some strange purple mist starting to creep in through the trees as he ran after that menacing skull-like face._

_He would catch him. He would make him pay._

_The purple mist got thicker, heavier. It had an odd smell – it had a smell in the first place. It curled around his heels, his thighs. It started to – to feel like soup, like a physical mass against his skin that slowed down his movements, and he could hear that skull’s maniacal laugh ahead of him._

_If he could just throw on some more speed… if he could just push himself further…_

_Nothing would distract him._

_He didn’t notice the muffled quality, the way sounds started to disappear. The way the trees seemed to grow larger, darker, blotting out even the weak moonlight. The way the air was different, heavier. The thick purple mass that made it hard to see anything anymore, rising up like a living thing. All he could pay attention to was that the Red Skull was out of his reach, getting further and further, and desperate now – Bucky’s sacrifice couldn’t be in vain, he couldn’t lose all that they worked for, he couldn’t let everyone down, not now, not now – he took his shield, slung it forward._

_His foot caught against something and he tripped._

_He went down._

 

Sound filtered into his ears, soft and muted. An old man, he slowly placed. Querulous voice. Grumbling.

As he started to begin to put sounds into actual words, he realized there were two voices. The other voice was a woman, soft and firm but with that edge of authority.

Old, too. A slight rasp, a small wheeze in the voice. A tremor in the tone, in the softness.

Steve opened his eyes.

There wasn’t a lot of light. It was very dull, very gray. Washed-out. For a moment, Steve wondered if he was staring at a picture, or a shadow.

“Peggy!”

The man’s voice was hoarse, and Steve pushed himself up off the bed, glancing around in confusion. The building was – familiar, but not. There was a lot of things that were unfamiliar, and the very blankets of the bed he was on felt… wrong, in a way.

Looking away from the flat black rectangle on the wall, he glanced across the bedroom. There was a white-haired woman, brown eyes sharp even in the folds and creases of skin. Her companion was a stooped old man, liver-spotted hands shaking on the cane’s handle, bifocals hiding soft, glazed brown eyes.

Steve squinted. Both of them looked familiar, in a way. As if looking through a distorted mirror.

“Are you – Howard? Peggy?” Steve asked faintly.

“Hah!” the man crowed triumphantly – weakly, with a rasping hoarse at the end of the sound that devolved into a cough. “Hah, he recognized us, it’s Steve, you can’t say it isn’t now,” he continued, breath whistling through his lips, his white beard patchy and scraggly.

Steve could feel his chest tightening as if he was having an asthma attack – something he was intimately familiar with from way back when. Was his serum not working? Was he – was he in hell? It sure felt like hell, with Peggy’s eyes staring out from under wiry grey hair and bracketed by crow’s feet, with Howard’s arrogance so familiar and yet so _wrong_ in the face of this liver-spotted and beaten face, all folded and drooping.

“Steve? Is this you, Steve Rogers?” Peggy asked, and her voice was rickety with age, slow and crackly, but it was _hers_ , he could hear it, and his chest stuttered again. It felt like he was dying, his lungs seized up and his heart pounding in terror against the inside of his ribs.

“Steve, I need you to calm down,” she murmured.

“W-wh-what h-h- _hap-_ happened?!” he gasped out, trying to force his lungs to work. “P _-Peg-Peggy_?!”

She put a hand against his face, and he froze, breath coming in so shallowly that he felt like he was starving for oxygen, fear making his eyes round and barely tracking, staring only at those kind brown eyes that were surrounded by the wrinkles and softness of age. So much age.

The thought came from out of nowhere, something terrifying and impossible and horrifying: _how long have I been asleep?_

“Calm down, Steve,” she repeated, her fingers stroking his cheek. “Breathe for me. Slowly, in and out. Look at me.”

“Peg- _Peggy_ ,” Steve stuttered, slowly pushing himself up. “What happened? What – where am I? How – how did I get h-here?”

The old man thumped closer, scraggly white hair clinging to his scalp, bifocals balanced on his nose. “We were hoping you could tell us,” he said in his raspy, hacking voice. “What do you remember last?”

Steve looked around the room even more carefully, noticing odd things – flat rectangles that were glossy black, odd typewriter keys without the typewriter machine, glowing numbers set in a small box. There were also more familiar things – peeling wallpaper, a small card table with two seats, a… well, something that looked a lot like an oven. Two somethings that looked like ovens, honestly, though Steve didn’t understand why there would be two ovens.

The house was small. It looked like everything was in this one room – and it was a house, not an apartment. There were windows on almost every single wall (three out of the four walls) and though there were heavy curtains hanging in front of the windows, light trickled underneath the edges of the curtains, painting thin lines of yellow on the floor. The room looked very dingy and dirty, rundown and old, like the two people in front of him. There was… well, a lot of items he couldn’t place. He’d call it junk, but for all he knew the numerous pieces everywhere were actually important and necessary.

In any case, the surroundings were… vastly different than he remembered last. The last he remembered, they were fighting a war, living out of tents in the middle of woods, tracking down HYDRA and the head of HYDRA, the Red Skull. Johann Schmidt. Schmidt had killed Bucky…

Steve could remember running after the Red Skull, hell-bent on not letting him escape justice.

“Steve?” the woman – Peggy? – called softly.

He focused back on the two of them. The woman was wearing… a suit, of some kind. Buttoned-up jacket, a severe skirt that went to her ankles, no-nonsense black shoes. Her wispy-thin hair was pinned back into a severe bun, vivid red lipstick adorning her lips. Pearl earrings hung from her lobes and her eyes were brushed with a light blue shadow.

For a moment, he could see past the age, past the wrinkles and the worry, and see _Peggy_.

“You’re – you’re really Peggy, aren’t you?” he whispered.

She smoothed her hand down his cheek, rested it lightly against his shoulder. “I am, Steve. And this is Howard. We… we have greatly missed you.”

Howard growled under his breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We don’t have time to mollycoddle him. We are testing our luck already; HYDRA has been watching this house. They’ll be sending the Rook here almost any minute. This needs to get done _fast_ , Peggy.”

“Patience, Howard,” Peggy snapped repressively. “Steve, we’ve been waiting so long to find you in the fog.”

“The fog?” Steve repeated, memories trickling in. “The… fog. I was chasing the, the Red Skull… through the fog. It was very thick – I couldn’t see him. He was really far ahead.”

The other two in the cabin stared at him expectantly, and Steve got really uncomfortable. Shifting his weight, he looked down at his clothes; they were still the same as when he had gone running after the Red Skull, his jeans even still mud-stained around his heavy boots and the tears from the fight at his knees and thighs.

“That’s it?”

Howard’s older, querulous voice was harsh and disbelieving.

“Howard!” Peggy reprimanded harshly.

The cane thumped authoritatively. “What? Peggy, we need something. Him telling us that he ran into the fog and then woke up here _does not help us_.”

“Help you do—?” Steve began, but Peggy was sniffing dismissively, standing up and grabbing a jacket thrown over the back of one of the rickety chairs at the card table.

“Peggy?” Howard asked.

She picked up a sedate clutch and glanced over the room at the two of them. “I need to contact the Hatter. Perhaps he can help.”

At that, Steve – confused, because he didn’t know what she was talking about – glanced at Howard to try and get a feel about what she meant. Howard’s face had turned thunderous, his bushy white eyebrows drawn severely down his wrinkled forehead. “We don’t need him.”

“Howard, the world has moved on. I know where the Dormouse is this week; I’ll go check on her, get a read on his location.” Peggy wasn’t even waiting to hear Howard’s response, opening the front door to reveal a slightly overcast sky, a bunch of trees, and something that looked like a car (more sleek, more narrow, hell, even the _metal_ looked different).

“There’s no guarantee he’ll speak to you!” Howard shouted after her.

The door closed.

“Aw, hell,” Howard grumbled, creaking away from the bed over to a chunky armchair, old and worn and stained. “If she’s going to waste her time…”

“Howard… what’s going on here?” Steve asked, pushing himself up to his feet and nearly falling over.

The old man harrumphed in his direction, not turning around to look at Steve. “What else? The Red Skull controls this city entirely, hell, pretty much the entire Eastern Seaboard when it comes right down to it.”

“How?” Steve asked, confused. “We were – we were in war, fighting HYDRA, and the Commandos—”

“Yes, yes, the Commandos. Oh, they did their best, they fought the good fight. And they got HYDRA knocked back, of course they did. Came home, fought the good fight here. But they left, or moved on, and HYDRA, well, HYDRA just keeps coming back. Of course it does. It’s fucking HYDRA.”

Steve leaned against the wall, realizing that his body felt very weak and wobbly, not great at holding him up at all. “We were fighting over in freaking _Germany_. How – the fog was in Germany—”

“We don’t know, Steve!” Howard snapped, picking up a small grey rectangle. “The hell were we supposed to do? We came back thinking you were dead. Then that same fucking fog you ran into appeared on the edges of the city, _right here_ , and what was I supposed to do? I know HYDRA is watching me. Hell, that fucking ‘Hatter’ already ensured I’d be watched the rest of my freaking life. I suppose it was only to be expected. But I moved out here and HYDRA will be here soon. I just hope Peggy manages to get you to where you need to be.”

“Why do you need _me_?” Steve asked, confused. “Why isn’t anyone standing up to – what do you want me to do? Why are you both so focused on me?”

“Because HYDRA perverted everything here. The cops, the mayor, the freaking Congress, everything belongs to the Red Skull and his Rook. There’s nothing we can do about it, and you coming back might be a sign. Certainly, you’re the only one able to go up against his pet assassin. And there’s the small matter of the fact that, with HYDRA so deeply embedded in the city, you don’t really have heroes. Not like there used to be. No, instead you get the Hatter and his… _ilk_. You get someone like the Enforcer or Alice, the contents of the gutter clearly in the street—”

There was a pounding on the door.

Steve froze, hand dropping to his side in a well-remembered move to pull a gun, only his thigh holster was empty. Grabbing up at his side-arm holsters, he found those empty, too. Now that he was paying attention, he realized his belt was considerably lighter. He was missing a lot of his supplies that he normally carried around, and he looked around for anything that could be a weapon.

“Howard Stark!”

Howard had pushed himself upright, moving with a rushed hurriedness to the bed, gesturing silently for Steve to turn back to the bed. After a few seconds, Steve realized that Howard was telling him to move the bed – and, in doing so, he saw a small latch on the floor. A trapdoor.

Shoving a wallet at Steve, Howard pointed fiercely at the ground.

The pounding came again, and Steve could hear people running around the house, hear the click of weaponry and ammo. There were at least seven, maybe ten, people outside beyond the man who was standing at the door. The raspy, almost guttural voice was slightly familiar – but Steve didn’t have time to think about it. Instead, Steve pulled back the latch, slid down the small tunnel, and then reached up through the half-closed trapdoor to slide the bed back into place as best as he could.

“Get _going_ ,” Howard hissed.

There was a heavy thud – someone had slammed into the door, trying to break it down, and Steve let the trapdoor fall shut and then he was sprinting down the completely dark and lightless tunnel.

Behind him, he could hear – faintly, getting fainter as he sprinted at top speed, hunched a little because he couldn’t see how tall the tunnel was – the door crash open and Howard shouting indiscriminately.

 

What Steve couldn’t figure out was why this had happened. He had no idea what was expected of him to _do_. As he began to see light at the end of the tunnel – literally – his mind was going a million miles an hour. All he knew was that he had gone running into the fog after Red Skull, certain that he needed to capture the head of HYDRA to really cripple the organization. Then – nothing, waking up here, having such an _old_ Howard and Peggy standing over him. Hearing that somehow HYDRA had migrated here, to America (that’s what the Eastern Seaboard meant, right? He _hoped_ he was in America; he had to assume that at this point), was something that staggered him. How could they have possibly gotten to these shores? Crossed a whole ocean and somehow manage to nestle and burrow in deep enough it was too difficult to root them out, which was why people wanted _him_ to do the removal?

The tunnel came out into a small underground room that was bolstered by wooden beams, and had steps cut into the far wall that ascended up to another trap door. The room was full of many odds and ends; Steve recognized an old telegraph, along with beakers full of strange, murky liquids.

He knew, of course, that it would be short work for someone to tear apart Howard’s house and find the trapdoor, but he needed some kind of weaponry to continue on from this point, if only to protect him from whoever would be following him down the tunnel. The very first thing he grabbed was a switchblade that was sitting almost eyelevel with him, on a rickety metal shelf.

There were some books scattered haphazardly around the different shelves, and his eyes were drawn towards a small, rotting desk in the corner. There were blueprints on it, some circular item, but at the bottom they were labeled with the word ‘HYDRA,’ so he folded them up and slipped them into one of his empty pockets. The desk also revealed an old but serviceable pistol, with a meagre handful of bullets – he pocketed both immediately.

Next to the desk was a carboard box, and Steve picked up the foil packets that he recognized as rations. From there, he moved towards the stairs, scanning the various different shelves for something a bit better than a tiny blade and a pistol to defend himself.

All of this was done within a minute or two – he did not fool himself that he had time for a leisurely search. He had to get out, and find Peggy. Hopefully, she had managed to get to wherever she had intended to go (find people, she had said – a mouse?) without being picked up by whoever had come to the house. How he was supposed to find her, though…

He had Howard’s wallet, secreted away in another compartment on his belt, but he wasn’t in any safe place to look through it and see if there was any way of contacting Peggy inside, like a number or an address. Instead, he snatched a couple of wrenches (at the very least, they could be thrown at someone, a heavy enough metal to concuss or knock someone out entirely) and scrabbled at the trapdoor. It was tightly closed, and he threw his shoulder against it. A rattle revealed it was locked shut purposefully, from the outside – some type of chain, probably. He peered through the small slats that let in the weak light, but couldn’t see anyone around.

He hoped he was right.

Backing up in the room, he bounced on the balls of his feet before exploding forward in a burst of speed, throwing his shoulder against the doors and shattering the frame.

Well, he had to hope that Howard wouldn’t be upset about that, or at least be understanding about why it was necessary.

In any case, he went rolling forward, out into dried and dying grass on the side of a road, sad and scraggly bushes and trees dotting the ground around him. The tar of the road hit his nose, and he blinked, disoriented.

There was nothing around. It looked like he was literally in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t see the house from the outside, couldn’t see anything at all.

But he couldn’t stay here. At the very least, he could see the city in the very far distance, and with more people were more opportunities to blend in to stay hidden.

Setting his focus on the city, he began to jog at a steady rate. He knew he could go for a long while at a steady pace; he needed to put as much space between himself and the house. That being said, while it was dangerous to be on the road, the road would hide his travels for a longer period of time – no twigs to break, or mud to leave footprints in. So he got onto the road and began eating away at the miles as the sun sank lower and lower on the horizon.

***

The city was… it felt _darker_ than he remembered cities being. There were a lot more homeless people on the corners and in the street. It felt like there was a haze of smoke sitting heavy in the air, smudging the sight of the towering skyscrapers, making the buildings look like they were fading away into the dark of the night.

There were enough lit up signs – bright, jarring, even eye-searing things – to tell him it was four twenty-two in the morning, and the streets felt as if they were still as full as if it were midday. He moved to a small café and ordered a coffee (giving up on all the options, the add-ins, the stimulants, and just asking for a black coffee in the smallest size). When he went to pay, however, he pulled out Howard’s wallet.

There were no bills, a few odd coins that looked radically different than the coins he remembered, and a small card.

“Oh,” he said quietly, and shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am—”

The woman huffed and snatched the card from his hand. “Just swipe the card like this,” she said impatiently, running it through a small black machine on the side.

The machine beeped ominously.

She looked at the card, then at him. “Fine. On the house. Get out of my sight.”

He didn’t know how to tell her how much the kindness meant to him, so he took the card and the wallet and the tiny soft-carboard cup full of black liquid before moving to a small table in the corner.

He set the wallet in front of him and looked through it a little more thoroughly. There was that card that had some raised numbers on it, Howard’s name printed across the front, a month and year stamped onto it. There were those few coins, all strange, with no numbers on them to provide him with any clue how much they were worth, and a many-times-folded picture of a young boy, brown-eyed and wild-haired, staring sullenly away from the camera next to a very young woman, no more than twenty or twenty-five. On the back were a series of letters that made no logical sense to Steve; too many vowels, not enough consonants, at least in no language that Steve knew.

In a zipper pocket, there was a token for some type of public transportation, and a tiny scrap of paper that had a single phone number scribbled, almost illegibly, upon it.

Well, if he could find a public phone somewhere, he could dial the number, see what happened. Surely some of the coins would be the right amount to let him call that number.

The door of the coffee shop opened, and a small, petite-looking woman walked in, hair cut to her earlobes, yellow drops in her ears and yellow-tinted glasses covering her eyes. She wore a pinstriped pantsuit with a fedora, which was strange enough, and she glanced around before letting her gaze fall on him.

He tensed, wondering if she was one of those who had been at Howard’s house, and had attacked Howard, but before he could decide to do anything she strode over confidently and sat down in front of him, her mouth bared in a smile.

“Well, hello, sailor, where did you come from?” she asked sweetly.

He eyed her without saying anything at all.

“I wonder, because you used a card no one should have used, on a day no one should have had it, in a part of town no one who has that card should be in. So it’s just very curious, and I wonder whether you came by that card honestly.” Putting her elbows on the tabletop, she rested her chin on her hands and fluttered her eyelashes at him. “C’mon, sweetie. Sate my curiosity.”

He fought not to blush at the low words and honestly the almost blatant tone that invited those types of thoughts, and instead cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I don’t know who you are, but I have to tell you that there’s not much you can do to me, so I have to ask you, do you really want to do this right now?”

She chuckled, tilting her head slightly. “You’re sweet, but I have to wonder whether you realize the full implications of who you’re talking to, and what you’ve done.”

“Should I know who I’m talking to?” he countered.

She narrowed her eyes at him, and the checkout girl – who had been ‘not-eavesdropping’ – froze in her movements for a breath before going back to over-polishing the countertop.

“What is your name, sailor?” she asked, and her voice had lost all playfulness, all sweet flirtation, and instead was smooth and cutting.

He looked at her a long moment before deciding there wasn’t anything wrong about using his name. “Steve Rogers, ma’am.”

That seemed to throw her a little; she leaned back and wrinkled her nose at him. “Steve Rogers? That’s a hell of a coincidence, sharing first and last name with the famous Captain America.”

“I _am_ Captain America,” he replied.

The checkout girl wasn’t even pretending not to watch them anymore, and from the stillness in her body indicated he’d said something wrong, somehow. He didn’t know how, and at this point he didn’t much care, because he was trying to figure out what was going on and he was hungry and tired and unable to make heads or tails of anything, and he was _lost_ , so terribly lost that he could barely stand it. How was he supposed to find energy to care?

“ _You_ are Captain America?” the girl asked, staring up at him from under the brim of her hat. “ _You_? Where’s your shield? Your troop? How did you get _here_? You disappeared in Germany.”

Staring down at the black liquid in his cup, he felt tears prickle the back of his eyes and he swallowed, hard. “I don’t know. I don’t know _anything_. Howard is – Howard is old, _Peggy_ is – god, she’s so – she’s old, and I’m, I _don’t know what’s_ _going on_!”

For a very long moment, the girl stared at him, considering, and then she flicked her eyes to the girl behind the counter. Standing up, she went to the counter and fished into her pocket.

Under her breath – but still, with his senses, Steve could hear her – the suited girl murmured, “Here. Tell the Hatter who comes looking, hmm?”

When the suited girl came back, she regarded him levelly for a moment before sighing and shaking her head. “Well, if you’re not who you say you are, I suppose we’re both screwed, but for now, I’d greatly appreciate it if you came with me without too much of a fuss. At the very least, you’ll get a free meal from it.”

“Drugged?” he asked, snidely.

She huffed out a laugh. “You’re immune to most drugs if you’re really Captain America, aren’t you? So what do you have to worry?”

After a few moments of indecision, he decided it was the only way he’d at least get some answers – whether he liked them or not – from someone. Sighing, he stood up and hefted the cup. “Thank you, ma’am. I really needed this,” he said to the woman behind the counter.

She smiled crookedly at him, her strawberry-blond hair falling out of the bun to wisp about her face. “I could tell. And it’s not like it was a great loss, anyway. You tell that Hatter I said hi, alright? And that I’m still waiting for him to drag his ass into this shop sometime instead of sending his little interns to fetch his coffee.”

At the name ‘Hatter,’ Steve paused, confused. He’d heard Howard and Peggy mention it – Howard derisively, Peggy calmly – and if he was going to go see this person… well, maybe he’d find Peggy there too. It would help him a lot, and it made it easier for him to follow the fedora out of the coffee shop and down the narrow street to a ridiculously tiny car parked practically in the gutter.

He gawked at it.

“Never seen a bug before?” she asked, but the words were almost absent, as if it was more her commenting out of habit than anything else.

“That’s a bug?” he asked.

She slanted a gaze over her shoulder. “It’s a VW Bug, a type of car. I guess you possibly _haven’t_ seen one yet, if you’re really Captain America.”

He glanced at the car again, and then gingerly opened the door. It seemed simultaneously more advanced and more fragile than the cars he could remember of his youth, and he tentatively sat down in the (tiny) space of the passenger seat.

She shook her head – it looked like she was amused, but he couldn’t _really_ tell – and moved to the sidewalk, where a small shape sat, huddled, in the grimy filth under the streetlight. With the car door between him and her, and the quiet-but-still-present sounds of the city around them, he couldn’t hear what she said now, but she reached into her pocket and pulled out something to drop in the person’s little tin cup.

When she got into the driver’s seat, he looked at her from the corner of his eye.

“What?” she asked, pressing her thumb to a little black dot against the dash. The car hummed underneath their feet and then lurched forward, a little jerky and uncoordinated.

He looked back at the skinny form, smothered in blankets. “Who was that? Why did you talk to them?”

She met his gaze steadily, then lifted a shoulder, turning her eyes back to the road. “One of the Hatter’s men. A thief – called Ant-Man, because he always seems to crawl into even the most secure of places. Plus, well. Ants do seem to be his constant companion, considering he’s a street drifter.”

“Surely this… Hatter can find a home for him?” Steve asked, a bit dismayed that whoever this was didn’t take better care of their men.

Letting out a slow breath, she shook her head slightly, hair swishing about her delicate ears. “You know, you’ve been gone a long time. I wouldn’t be telling other people how to live right now, not when we’re still trying to figure out if you’re a Red piece or a Rogue.”

“A what or a what?” Steve asked, head spinning from the strange terms.

“For example, I’m the Dormouse; I work for the Hatter and his Rogues. And you’re being chased by the Red pieces – specifically, the Rook. Well, we call him the White Rook, because he’s got a bunch of things that make him different from other Red pieces – well, that’s besides the point right now. The _point_ is that we don’t know you are who you say you are, and having that card puts you in a preeeety bad position.”

He tentatively reached for his pocket. “If it’s a problem, I can just toss it, and then—”

“No, no – don’t do that. It’s important, and the Hatter will get to explain all that to you, as well as verify who you are.” She bit her lip slightly, and Steve felt the car pick up a bit more speed. Glancing at the rearview mirror, he realized that, for all that there were other cars and some sparse vehicle traffic on the street, there were two cars that seemed to keep a consistent distance and pace with them.

The name ‘Dormouse’ tugged something at his mind, and he stared at her a long minute as she made a sudden right, and then an immediate left. “You – Peggy said she was going to find you.”

“You know Peggy?” the girl (the Dormouse?) asked, but her voice was strained and he wasn’t entirely sure she was paying attention to him or his answer, since she continued over his words, “I suppose it makes sense that you know Peggy, if you somehow came from Howard. She was the only one who knew his hiding place, after all.”

“He was in hiding?” Steve asked, trying to put everything together – but there were too many different pieces, too many unanswered questions, he was hungry, he was tired, he was _scared_ , and it felt like he had just seen all the Commandos yesterday and yet he was – hell, he didn’t even know the year, he knew he was in the future but _he had no idea how far into the future—_

“Whoa, hey, calm down, I need you to breathe, okay? Steve, Steve, I need you to breathe, this is really not a great time for a panic attack because I need to drive oh gods and monsters _hell_ —”

The car suddenly jerked left, throwing him against the door, and he gripped the handle tightly, trying to center himself.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to shoot a gun, would you?” she murmured under her breath, jigging the car right and nearly sending him sprawling against her. The handle creaked underneath his hand and he tried to shove it all away, tried to just focus on what was happening here and now. All of that needed to be forgotten, or at least ignored, since they were in immediate danger now.

“Um – yes,” he managed to say. “Yes, I can shoot.”

Her eyes cut over to him, a quicksilver flicker before they centered back on the road. “There’s a pistol underneath your seat. Don’t shoot until they do. I don’t want to lead them to the Hatter, but at the same time the Hatter’s Jabberwock is really what will make quick work of them, since everyone else is out right now.”

It was that strange name that finally gave Steve one of the mystery pieces he’d been mulling over. “The – Jabberwock? The Dormouse? The Hatter? You all – you’re using Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as, what, a naming guide?”

“Well, when you’re down the rabbit hole,” she muttered, twisting the wheel quite suddenly to flip the car 180 degrees and barreling down on their pursuers. “I need you to look into the cars and tell me if there’s someone in there who is dressed in all white. White suit jacket, white gloves, either in the passenger seat or the driver’s seat I would guess, but check the whole car.”

Given a concrete action and direct orders, it was easier for Steve to shove past the gibbering part of his mind that was snatching at random pieces of information, trying to make sense of it. Squinting hard, he glanced at the cars as they zoomed past (the wrong way, and he had to admit that the girl had excellent control of the car, weaving around the few other cars who were also on the road as she shot between their two pursuers), and while he couldn’t make out everything or everyone, he could tell that there were people in the front and back of both cars, most of them dressed in what appeared to be all black.

No! Wait – there was a flash of white in the second car!

“Yeah, it looks like someone’s wearing white in the second, in the farthest car. License plate CJ-something,” Steve said quickly.

“Shit,” she muttered. “They found you a lot faster than I expected. They must have already been on your tail from the start—” She froze minutely and let out a sharp breath. “Oh… no, they have Howard, don’t they?”

“Probably?” Steve said, a bit awkwardly. “I did – I mean, I ran away from his house and there were people at it banging on the door?”

The girl huffed out a heavy breath and veered down a small side alley, the car tilting sideways. As it did, she stabbed at the dash, pressing a small button down.

“Yes, Dormouse?”

The voice that suddenly appeared was robotic and coming from the speakers.

“RABBIT, I need you to clear a path, and tell Hatter we’re coming in with a tail.”

“Of course, Dormouse.”

Steve looked at all the buttons around the dash and then at her. “You have a robot?” he asked.

She took another tight corner and drove forward into a darkened archway. Almost immediately, she turned off the car and sat still. Taking his cue from her, he also hunched down and stayed quiet.

The two cars pursuing them sped down the alleyway and skidded away. Steve could almost swear the person wearing white turned his head to look at them as the cars shot past.

“Great. We have maybe five minutes to get you to the Hatter, get this information to a safe place, and then get the hell out of there before the Rook catches up with us,” the … Dormouse?... muttered. “This isn’t going to go well.” Jabbing the button again, she whispered, “RABBIT, we’re heading down, but be on alert. They’ll follow us soon enough.”

“Acknowledged.”

She got out of the car and gestured quickly to him. “I’m sure they’ll be back. The have the Rook – he always gets the person he’s searching for.”

“Will any of this get explained to me at some point?” Steve snapped.

“If we have time, sure. You wanna wait around? You didn’t have to fire the gun; I’d like to count that as a win and make sure all those bullets stay where they’re supposed to.” She moved to the back of the large room – a garage, now that he was looking closely at the broken tools and unused pieces of wood and machines scattered around the floor.

He followed her and watched as she shifted a pile of boxes that revealed a small trapdoor. “You head down. Get to the Hatter; he’ll explain if he can. Don’t be surprised if he is a little untrusting. And leave me the gun; I’ll need it more than you at this point.”

He didn’t really want to give up the gun, but he also wasn’t going to leave her without a gun while she waited up here to cover his escape. Grudgingly, he handed over the pistol and then she pulled open the trapdoor.

He started to walk down the ladder and then paused.

“Hurry up! What are you waiting for?”

Steve braced his hand on the wooden frame and levered her the most unimpressed look he could give her. “I would really like to have a name for you other than ‘dormouse,’ you know.”

Squinting at him, she let out an exasperated sigh. “ _Now_ you ask?”

“We’ve been a little busy!” he snapped back.

“Janet, my name’s Janet, now get going!”

Steve nodded. “Nice to meet you, Janet.”

“Nice to meet you too, soldier, now get _going_!”

***

The ladder opened up to a long tunnel, and Steve sighed and shook his head. Might as well. He began to run down the only direction he could, going (for him) a medium pace so it would be easier to stop should something happen. Nothing did happen, though; he just ran down the tunnel until he couldn’t anymore.

A dead end? Was there a door hidden somewhere?

Steve paced the walls of the tunnel, even looking up to see if there was a hidden door there, trying to figure out where to go next. Was this a trap all along?

“What’s the password?”

Steve jerked away from the wall he’d been studying, placing himself in the middle of the tunnel. Slowly, he rotated, glancing around him in carefully controlled movements, trying to figure out where the voice had come from.

“The password, soldier – we don’t have all day.”

It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere; the voice was fairly young, an almost roguish quality to the words, and Steve had just about had it with the unexplained, half-truths, empty questions, and bizarre environment.

“Well, perhaps your precious Dormouse should have said something about a password, but she didn’t! All she did was vaguely threaten me, drive us in a ridiculously tiny car, and then shove me down a tunnel that has two ends and nothing else! I’ve woken up in a strange time, with strange people, in a world that _does not make sense_ , and I just really want some explanations and _not_ be asked more stupid ‘this-should-be-obvious-and-easy-to-answer’ questions!” Steve snarled.

There was silence for a moment, and then the voice asked, “What’s your name, soldier?”

“I,” he said, slowly and quietly, remembering the first time he had enlisted to fight Nazis overseas, what the Howling Commandos had been like, Bucky, _Bucky_ , by his side, the agents of the SSR, Peggy and Howard _young_ , teenagers like he had been, just as desperate to prove themselves as he had been – everything and everyone he had lost – “I am Steve Rogers. And I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

With a soft hiss, the _entire wall_ to his right shifted and rolled to the side to reveal a bunker-looking room, only furnished, with chairs and tables and cars, doors and even rugs in some areas.

Then a young man stepped out from behind a small table that held multiple small black rectangles that had moving pictures on them. He was dressed in black pants and shirt, his red jacket complementing his red boots and his single red glove. On his head was a red top hat, and those amber brown eyes were almost a little crazy.

“Well, then you should feel right at home in our topsy-turvy world,” he said, and Steve recognized his voice as the voice from in the tunnel. “Hey, Rabs, scan him quickly and alert our Cat to get the car running. We’ll probably have to leave here very quickly, very soon.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere without getting some answers!” Steve interjected, even as a light blue light suddenly _appeared_ around him.

“Scan complete. No trackers or wires on him. He has the card on him.”

 _That_ voice was that robot voice from the car, and Steve jumped a little. “What’s going _on_?” Steve demanded.

“Oh, right, Steve Rogers, Captain America, meet my artificial intelligence. My AI. I call him Rabbit, because he guides us on this crazy journey through Wonderland,” the young man said, flapping his hand dismissively as he walked up to Steve.

It was nerve-wracking to have this young man get right up against Steve, right in his face, though it gave Steve the chance to notice that the glove and the boots weren’t just a glove and boots, but some type of mechanical contraption, and the hat also reflected a little of the light.

“What?” Steve asked.

The young man poked at his chest. “Looks like this shirt is painted on, Cap. Love showing off those abs, don’t you? If I had abs like that, I’d want to show them off too. Then again, my body armor protects me against nasty attempts at killing me.” He walked around Steve in a slow circle, and Steve stifled the urge to keep his eyes on him at all times. “So, where’s the card?”

“The card?” Steve repeated.

“Yes, _the card_ , the one Jan told you was important, the one that let me _find_ you, the one that was supposed to be hiding away with Daddy-dearest and yet somehow it’s _here_ with _you_ practically shouting its presence to the rooftops for everyone to find,” the man said in exasperation.

“Does no one introduce themselves in the future?” Steve asked, a little disappointed.

The young man opened his mouth again and then paused. “Huh. Alright, I’ll grant you that. My name is Tony Stark, the Hatter, the head of the Rogue faction here in New York as we try to keep the Red faction from destroying more of this city than it already has.”

“Factions?” Steve repeated faintly.

“Sir,” the robot – Rabbit? – murmured.

“Yes, factions. Everyone belongs to a faction. Those who don’t are the poor fuckers who get shit on by the factions. We won the war against the Nazis, but not against human greed. Nazi scientists were smart, so companies and even the government dragged them back over here and employed them and then, maybe about twenty, thirty years ago, the Red Skull appeared. Of course, we all knew the Red Skull—”

As he was talking, the man – Tony – was moving around the room, leaning over small type-writer-looking devices and tapping some keys. The black rectangles, before showing nothing or small pictures, all lit up red and a countdown began in the center of the screen.

“—So some of us tried to fight back. But he has someone – we call him the White Rook because he dresses in white, and because he is rather simplistically inclined – as his enforcer and the White Rook is the best there is. He never stops coming for you. The only person to escape had been my father, but I guess that’s not true anymore.”

Steve winced. “I’m sorry—”

“Why should you be?” Tony asked, spinning around to pin Steve with an almost physical glare. “You have no idea what’s happening. No, my father knew just what harebrained, idiotic shit he was getting in to and he refused my help and my protection. You do have that card, don’t you?”

Steve reached for the wallet that was in his pocket, and Tony shook his head.

“Don’t get it out now, don’t worry. Do me a favor, press the red button behind you, yeah?”

Steve turned to see a giant, glaring red button that was labeled ‘Don’t push, and that means you Clint and Loki!’ He glanced at Tony, who was shoving some rectangles along with some books and paper and odds and ends into a briefcase. “The big button that says don’t push?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, that one, push it please. Anyway, long story short, we’re actually pretty close to figuring out how the hell to bring the Red Skull down, but by now we don’t just want to bring him down but all the people who either supported him in his rise to power or who he maneuvered into place by appointing them or other… more nefarious ways. In any case, that will take a lot more rooting out, and even the SSR is riddled with his plants. So we went Rogue. Went underground, let him think that he has all the power while we worked to compile a list of everyone we could find.”

After pressing the button, Steve stepped away and some pieces began to make sense. “The list is on that card somehow, isn’t it?”

“Yep. Continuously updating that list, and we’ve been planning a major offensive and takedown of Red Skull and his goons – seriously, some of them are serious morons – when you plugged that card into that chip reader and broadcasted your position across all the networks. When Howard would plug it in, it was on a secure network, pinging directly from my terminal to his, and safe – but you didn’t know, and it was designed to look like a credit card, anyway. I should have guessed that Howard was still trying to locate you in the temporal fog; after all, he had that mask piece on his desk the last time. But none of that matters!”

A briefcase in hand, a backpack on his back, and the hat tipped rakishly over his eyes, Tony snagged Steve’s hand, holding it tight. “Let’s go before the explosion!”

“The what?” Steve asked, shocked.

“You know, the self-destruct sequence you initiated?” Tony replied blithely. “Let’s go!” Without waiting for a reply, Tony took off running towards a set of stairs in the back of the room, dragging Steve with him.

If Steve wanted to stop, he could. It would be easy enough to plant his feet, to force this person to explain more, give him a way to verify all the information. At the same time, it made sense. (Well, more sense than anything else Steve had come up with so far.) And even if it didn’t make sense, and Steve shouldn’t trust Tony, that didn’t change the fact that Tony shouldn’t care one way or the other about Steve. If the bad guy didn’t care or worry about you, you were unimportant and therefore largely safe, in Steve’s experience.

So Steve went willingly enough, but on the foot of the stairs there was a muffled explosion, and the two of them turned around to see the wall had been blown open. Standing behind the hole made in the wall was a man dressed in a white suit, shades covering his eyes, a gun in his hand.

“Crap, we just gotta run and pray,” Tony was saying, but Steve stared at the man.

“Bucky?” he asked – whispered, really, staring at the familiar form, the broad shoulders, the long hair and defined jaw.

The man looked up at Steve’s whisper, and he shouldn’t have heard it, not from so far away, after having just exploded a wall and therefore disrupting his hearing for a short while, but the man’s eyes trained in on him. Slowly, he took off his shades to reveal familiar brown eyes – but they were empty.

“Bucky?” Steve repeated, taking half a step forward. “You’re here?”

“Who the hell is Bucky?” the guy asked, taking a step into the room and glancing around at all the red screens as they ticked over their last seconds and went black.

Suddenly, there was a larger rumble, and Tony jerked Steve’s arm. “Look, man, we’ll figure this shit out later, it’s time to go now!”

Both the man – _Bucky_ – and Steve turned their heads to where the rumble was getting louder, water beginning to pour through the bricks of that wall, and then the man turned on his heel and began running the way he came. Steve stopped fighting Tony’s tugs and began running up the stairs with him.

“That was the Rook, you know the Rook? It makes so much more sense – no, no it doesn’t, how the hell do you know the Rook?” Tony yelled as they fought to get up the stairs before they were flooded out.

“I didn’t _know_ I knew him,” Steve shouted back, finally giving up running at Tony’s pace and scooping the (tiny, jeez, he barely weighed a thing) young man into his arms, briefcase and backpack awkwardly banging against the both of them, and began pounding up the steps as the pouring and rushing noise got louder and louder.

“Door!” Tony yelped, and Steve looked away from the steps and the rapidly rising water to see a door set in the ceiling.

Growling under his breath – he’d been running away too much recently – he tucked his head down and pulled Tony close to his chest, springing up into the door with all the force he could muster on short notice, hitting it with his neck and shoulder.

The door cracked and Steve rocked back and then set Tony down – water climbing to their knees – and _punched_ up with shoulder and fist.

Tony clambered out first without waiting for Steve, but Steve was right on his tail. Another young man, black-haired and dressed in black slacks, a green vest, and a green overcoat, lounged against a sleek silver car, and they were standing in a deserted place that looked a lot like an office building. If office buildings had cars in the middle of the floor.

“With how much you’ve gone on about why I couldn’t press the button, you’d expect more explosions,” the man drawled, getting up to move to the driver’s seat. “He’s sitting in the back.”

“Couldn’t blow it up; there’s city and things right above us,” Tony muttered, throwing the briefcase and backpack into the trunk. “Steve Rogers, Captain America, this is Loki, my Cheshire Cat.”

Loki rolled his eyes in the most expressive and dismissive eyeroll Steve had ever seen. “He loves his Alice. We all have our fascinating nicknames, unfortunately. You have the list, correct?”

“Yes, he has the cards.”

“Will he change the plans any? You know we’d need to alert Natasha if—”

Tony gestured frantically at Steve and Steve, taking the hint, got in the backseat while Tony slid into the front. Loki turned the keys in the ignition as Tony muttered, “No, no this doesn’t change much. We just can’t have Howard as a backup. We’ll have to find another safe place for our evidence when we bring it before trial. Rabs, check on Jan, make sure she’s okay. Take us to the palace, Loki, we need to…”

Tony trailed off, then whipped around in the seat. “You recognized the Rook.”

Steve felt a pang of familiarity, and sorrow, and something akin to hope. “Y-yeah, I did. That’s – I thought he had died. I thought he’d fallen from… I thought he was dead.”

“So maybe you can get through to him! You remove the White Rook, our plan becomes infinitely easier and simpler. You think you can do that?”

And Steve… Steve had not expected this. Not at all. He still had questions, he still didn’t have all the pieces, but he met Tony’s excited gaze, his palm still slightly warm from where Tony had taken it, still feeling the phantom weight of Tony’s body in his arms, and he realized that he was tired of running.

“Yeah,” he said, letting the first smile in a long time spread over his face. “Yeah, I think I can talk to him.”

He may not know what was coming next, but with this Mad Hatter by his side, well…

Anything was possible.


End file.
